US anti-terror policy 'creates hundreds of new enemies'

The new US tool for fighting terrorists, the drones, creates more enemies than killing ‘bad guys’, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C., Akbar Ahmed, told RT.

Arguably the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam
believes the US authorities greatly underestimate the tribal nature
of most of the Muslim societies in their war on
terror.

RT:Post 9/11 the US has been all over the map chasing
terrorists. But then you see terror growing right here in the US in
a well-educated area like Cambridge Massachusetts, referring to the
Boston bombers. What slipped through the cracks in America’s
understanding of terror?

Dr. Akbar Ahmed: This is a new phenomenon and a
challenge. When people say home-grown terrorism it really means
Muslim youth – those who grew up in the US and have turned against
the US. I believe that several causes are to be identified. You
have the problem of youth growing up in a culture, not of their
own. Many of these people are from the Middle East, south Asia or,
in the case of the Boston bombers, from the Caucasus. They grow up
in a culture, which sort of accepts them and sort of doesn’t.

RT:But by so many accounts they did fit in.

AA: As I said, they fit on one level, but on the other
level they don’t. They are hearing around them so much talk of
islamophobia, someone attacks their religion, Koran, not
necessarily on the religious level. So their response isn’t
necessarily an Islamic response, but also a cultural one. The same
phenomenon can be seen in the UK where you have many of these young
British-born Muslims being accepted, playing cricket, going to pubs
and so on, and yet being involved in terrorism. There aren’t many
such cases, but these cases, I believe, are consequences of several
failures of society, which is unable to integrate them fully, and
their own community not being able to detect who they are and give
them a certain direction.

RT:Apparently Tamerlan Tsarnaev didn’t fit into FBI’s
profile of who would be a jihadist. Can we talk about the danger of
profiling in law enforcement?

AA: I was in charge of law and order myself in the tribal
areas of Pakistan, in Balochistan, which is one of the most
difficult areas to administer. We were taught when the cat is about
to jump and when it will jump. When you profile people broadly, for
example all Middle East-looking people, and you only look at them
then your mentality is that a blue-eyed or blond-haired cannot be a
terrorist. But as we know terrorism comes in every form and every
shape. We’ve had many terror attacks in the US by people who
weren’t Muslim. Timothy Mcveigh is just one famous example of that.
So the aim is to prevent violence whoever commits it.

RT:Why do those people, many of them presumably
well-read and educated, find what they find in Islam?

AA: First, the assumption that education means a person
is compassionate, sensible, pluralist or inclusive is not really
correct. Secondly, what is coming from Islam is equally not
correct. Perhaps the most terrible example in history is what the
Germans did to the Jewish community in Germany in the 1930s and
1940s. From 25 to 30 percent of SS personnel were PhDs or had
higher education decrees. Where did that leave their humanity? They
were completely unsympathetic to the Jewish community. So we have
to be very careful making these generalizations. Very often these
people act as they do, which is completely unacceptable, they come
out of their own broken societies and distort the understanding of
Islam.

RT:What difference have drones, the new US tool for
fighting terrorists, really made?

AA: In my opinion the debate around drones has just
started. There is one side of the debate, which is the most
problematic, and that is how the Americans see the usefulness of
drones. What they don’t see is an impact drones are having across
the world on local tribes, local communities. You may have 1, 2, 3
intended targets killed, the so-called bad guys, but then you have
100, 200, 300 completely innocent people killed including women,
and children. There are many reports confirming this. That creates
hundreds of new enemies.

RT:It seems that the main point of discussions around
drones was whether or not they should kill American citizens. The
fact it could kill innocent people without due process remained
sidelined. What was your impression?

AA: My sense was that the Americans were very
ethnocentric when dealing with this issue. They aren’t really
connecting this to people across the world, who are being killed in
drone strikes. But I’m sure that this debate will continue. The
Americans have great social conscience. If you pick up an idea and
they feel there is injustice they pick it up themselves and they go
for it. But right now this isn’t happening. Also we have to
understand that when you have a place like Waziristan, which is the
focus of my book. A small place, really impoverished, tribal
society, no hospitals, no roads, no education facilities, and you
are hit with drones again and again. They’ve ended up by killing
over 300 people in drone attacks in Waziristan alone. Think about
the impact it could have on a small society. It just rips it apart.
In that vacuum you will certainly have violent angry killers, as
you call, who then go down to Karachi and other bigger cities and
blow themselves up. Once they killed a ten year old boy, a
Pakistani army officer, in a mosque. They killed him and said ‘Now
you know how we feel and what we go through every day’.

RT:In your book ‘The Thistle and the Drone’ you write
how the US props up central governments, which then go out and
fight tribes. It’s true for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen. Is it
because the US doesn’t understand tribal society or just doesn’t
want to understand?

AA: The war on terror, as I see it, resembles a triangle.
I call it a ‘triangle of terror’. You have the US at one point, you
have the central government at another point and the third point is
tribal society. So far in the discussion we don’t hear much about
the tribal society. Very often we see the US and central
governments in alliance, but what they don’t realize, and this is a
very important point, that terrorist are coming out of societies,
which have nothing to do with supporting them. In fact, they are
the victims now – they’ve been killed by the drones, by their own
armies, and they’ve been blown up by suicide bombers. Tribal
society lies underneath a vast number of Muslim population from
Morocco across North Africa to the Middle East and to the Caucasus.
The Code of honor, the code of hospitality, the code of revenge –
all these things are very important and defining these societies.
Not so much Islam but the tribal code. And there you have a kind of
an internal tension, which hasn’t been resolved after
centuries.

RT:The Pakistani government condemns the US strikes
in very strong terms but at the same time allows them. That kind of
a two-faced policy, is it sustainable?

AA: No, it isn’t. I called it duplicities in my book. On
the one hand they are telling the Pakistani people that they have
nothing to do with that. On the other hand they align with
Americans to go ahead with the drone strikes. The Pakistani PM has
many times said that he would object to it, that he would go to
parliament and say that the Americans shouldn’t do these terrible
things. But he goes ahead with that. The people of Pakistan aren’t
stupid. They understand the game. But again you ask
yourself does it help law and order, does it help peace and
stability, and does it help check the men of violence? And the
answer is ‘No’.

RT:Why isn’t Pakistan saying the real ‘No’?

AA: I think it’s because they have a weak government.
They want to stay in power. It takes a lot of courage to stand up
and say to a superpower ‘Guys, we are your friends, but you are
messing it up for us’.

RT:Afghanistan past 2014, is it going to move back to
the rule by tribes?

AA: That’s a very important question. I asked someone who
lived there and worked with the tribes. The country is going to
face a lot of challenges both internally and regionally.

RT:If the structure of their society is tribal maybe
it’s a natural way for them to go back to tribal society?

AA: Don’t forget what happened to Afghanistan in the last
few decades. First, there was the Soviet invasion, which disrupted
all the old structures – chiefs, the elders, the religious
structure, the central government, the King of Afghanistan. So you
have a tribal society in a state of destruction. Then 1990s with
the Taliban, which brought even more disruption. Then you have 9/11
and the American invasion with more disruption. Three decade later
this tribal society is different, the tribal code has mutated,
Islam has mutated. And from those mutations you see violence,
violence, violence.